The Modern UI port of VLC media player for Windows 8 arrived on the Windows Store late yesterday, after a lengthy, lengthy development period of easily more than a year.

And as promised, the lead developer on the project shared more details with fans.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president of VideoLAN said in an interview that Microsoft was not overly helpful when it came to the development of the application, and the French subsidiary of the software titan did not actually provide the team with anything.

Not even one Surface RT unit for testing purposes, he quips:

“Some people of Microsoft have been AMAZINGLY helpful and supportive, mostly engineers. I’m not sure I’m allowed to name them, though… But, at the same time, managers, and notably Microsoft France, have promised a lot of help and did not give anything, not even one surface RT.”

However, it was not all doom and gloom, because some of the engineers did provide valuable assistance to port the app — Microsoft Canada jumped in to rescue with the necessary help and resources to make the Metro flavor of VLC possible:

“We’ve been bounced through Microsoft divisions, hopelessly… There is a very notable exception, from Microsoft Canada! That helped us in numerous ways!”

The application is still in beta stage, and a Windows RT port is actually destined for arrival at a future date. But they hype and anticipation of VLC for Windows 8 had been so high, that fans will be pleased that the most important milestone has been reached.